


Encore

by vissy



Category: Tintin
Genre: Castafiore/Calculus - Freeform, F/M, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-12-25
Updated: 2003-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-02 03:06:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vissy/pseuds/vissy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Milanese Nightingale loses her voice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Encore

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2003 Yuletide Challenge, for Rook. Set after _Tintin and the Picaros_.

La Scala had seen its share of tragedy. Sometimes the damage was minor. In 1887 Verdi caused his first Iago, the French-born baritone Victor Maurel, no small hurt when he decreed that the Maurel moustache must go. But whiskers grow back, and six years later Maurel’s Falstaff was a hairy character indeed.

Sometimes disaster loomed somewhat larger. An air raid in 1943 left La Scala bruised and battered, its gaudy, golden interior exposed to the unforgiving glare of day. The Milanese took the insult with admirable calm. The years had taught them that La Scala would rise up.

Toscanini once stormed off the rostrum during a 1903 performance of _Un ballo in maschera_ because the audience wanted an encore. Three years later he returned to La Scala.

They always did.

***

La Scala welcomed its favourite daughter back with a torrential ovation. The Milanese loved a spectacle, and their nightingale, released from her squalid San Theodorian cage and resplendent on stage in one of Marguerite’s prettiest gowns, was an awesome sight. Like the legendary Eugenia Burzio (another of La Scala’s Junoesque prima donnas), La Castafiore was what you might call a woman you had to listen to without looking at her. Yet none could look away. Was she marked by her incarceration? Would the ordeal tell on her voice? They gawked and gossiped and swallowed her down as she stood before them, her arms upraised to accept the hard-won adoration of the _loggione_.

Silence eventually fell, a palpable weight upon her shoulders. The first item on the programme was the Jewel Song from _Faust_. In private, she called it her party piece. It was thin music, suitable for a girlish Gretchen, and she had fattened it with her thunderous voice until few men dared take the stage opposite her. She was only dimly aware of her subversion. It was a queen that Marguerite saw in the mirror, and a queen she would be.

The piano sounded and La Scala braced itself; even the great chandelier had been known to tremble before La Castafiore, who always wielded her open chest voice like a bludgeon. The audience sucked in a collective breath as they watched the two great lungs fill with air, yet no song emerged - not a peep, not a hiccup, just an agonisingly long wheeze. The audience gazed upon the stage in horror and wonderment and glee. Had their diva truly been transformed into a punctured tire? It was the stuff of nightmares, and they had had the fortune to witness it. As the piano tapered off in confusion, a contemptuous whistle slid down from the gallery and was quickly joined by dozens and then hundreds more pursed lips. The sibilant, blistering _fischi _stung her like snakes, and La Castafiore did the only thing she could do, falling prone across the stage in a graceless swoon.

***

NIGHTINGALE SILENCED. That was the kindest headline. A spokesperson for La Scala spoke to the press at length about San Theodoros and trauma and hysterical muteness, and of refunds and postponements. He could not say when or even if the signora would sing again. The Milanese nodded wisely amongst themselves. Many great artists had lost their voices at one time or another. That other famous nightingale, Jenny Lind, had suffered through her own brief period of hysterical muteness in her youth. And poor Burzio had lost her voice (and eventually her life) to drugs. Even Callas had fallen hoarse following a drunken New Year’s revel and had humiliated herself before the president.

Some days later, spurred on by a tidy sum from _Tempo di Roma_, an indiscreet medical practitioner unburdened himself of the tale of another tragedy - a miscarriage suffered by Signora Castafiore following her collapse at La Scala.

The city tittered and tsked. _Dio mio_, at her age! Surely La Castafiore was well past forty? No wonder she had been struck dumb. Not only was it shameful, it was downright ludicrous.

But ah! It was opera.

***

She retreated to her villa on Lake Como and denied all visitors for an entire month before boredom got the better of her. When Irma brought her news that Professor Calculus had returned yet again (seventeen days in a row, was the poor fellow mad?) she finally nodded to allow his admittance.

She hoped he might have something to say for himself, for she remained decidedly mute. She flicked through the spiral-bound notebook she had been using for communication, astonished anew at how dull the free verse of her life was: _no, NO, the red one, no the RED one, GO AWAY, take it away, those pigs, I HATE them, nasty, no, no, DIO MIO, no_. And so on. There was really little there that need be committed to paper at all. A simple (and usually violent) gesture sufficed in most instances. Even if she could speak, she had nothing to say.

The Professor smiled and blushed as he followed Irma into the sitting room. “Dear lady,” he said, “my dear lady.” She discovered that she was in the mood for adoration and gave him her hand. His own hands were otherwise empty, and she remembered the roses he had presented to her once, a thousand years ago. _Another ineffectual Siebel_, she had thought at the time. A woman’s role, but how men liked to take it on, the silly creatures. She retrieved her hand from his reverent lips and turned to a blank page in her notebook, where she wrote, _Plus de bouquets a Marguerite_. It was for her own eyes more than his, and she was surprised when he removed his spectacles and rubbed at them absently with a handkerchief, saying, “No, no more flowers.”

Irma brought in champagne and cake; he requested a cup of tea instead and spilt chocolate crumbs everywhere. His voice had the unusual atonal quality of the deaf, and he prosed on cheerfully for over an hour, telling her of his work at the university, of the scientific papers he was writing, of the letters he had received from Tintin and her stubborn Captain Paddock who were adventuring together in the Galapagos Islands. He did not allude to the disaster at La Scala, nor did he refer to the unpleasantness in San Theodoros, or to Sponsz. She had some vague recollection that he had had his own run-in with the dear colonel, and she appreciated his reserve; she had never liked having her hurts prodded or even acknowledged.

Eventually he rose to leave, and she found that she was almost sorry to say (or rather wave) goodbye. His eyes flicked back toward her notebook, still open at Mephistopheles’ sarcastic words. “You might fill that book - and a hundred more besides - with your memoirs,” he said. “It would be an impressive tale.”

She closed her eyes, trying not to reveal her impatience. She had thought of it, of course. But life had turned into such a dreary approximation of art. It was quite absurd. It wouldn’t be so bad if there really was a queen in the mirror, but she was just Bianca after all, with little to show for herself without her song. There was a burst of popping joints and she looked down to find him kneeling at her feet. He took her hand once more, pressing something cool and smooth and round into her palm. “It’s a pendulum,” he said. “I’ve often found it rather useful when searching for things that seem lost.”

Was this talisman supposed to bring back her song? Would it change the ending of the tale to her liking? It was useless, of course. But she found she could recognise and accept a genuine kindness untinged by pity, and she listened as he explained the use of the pendulum. “Unfortunately, of all dowsing methods, the pendulum is probably the most sensitive to auto-suggestion,” he said. “But you might find a little suggestion quite handy. It’s different for everyone.”

***

He returned every day after that and became quite dear to her, this dithering, blushing little man. She supposed that after a lifetime of muddled conversation, he was glad of her silent and attentive audience. He spoke to her about his inventions as though she understood his words, and she found that listening to a person might teach her something (though little of the subject at hand). She still thought music was more interesting than people, and she could see that he thought the same of machines, but they didn’t seem to bore one another. She was cold and he seemed to adore her for it. In the middle of a dissertation about combustion engines, he would cast himself at her feet in a queer fit of passion and press trembling lips to the arch of her foot. She would give an impatient little kick and he would recollect himself and return to his engines as if nothing had happened. Sometimes he spoke wistfully of his laboratory at Marlinspike Hall, and she understood that he remained in Italy for her sake alone.

She was in the shower one morning when she heard a strange voice. Irma burst through the door and clattered across the bathroom tiles to take her sodden, snarling mistress in her arms. “You were singing, madame,” Irma wept. “You were singing.”

The Professor, still snug in bed with his nose buried in a paper about grounded-cathode amplifiers, wondered if a storm was brewing.

***

At the disastrous La Scala premiere of _Madama Butterfly_ in 1904, Puccini, pleading for quiet from the hissing mob, was booed off the stage. Despite the enormous popularity the opera eventually gained, Puccini never forgot its first failure.

At a poor performance of _Medea _in 1961, Callas turned upon the whistling La Scala crowd with a cry of “_Crudel_!” She shook a defiant fist at the audience and rebuked them, “_Ho dato tutto a te_!” They gave her a splendid ovation in the end.

Regardless of heaven’s expectations, at La Scala it was better to demand respect than beg forgiveness, and that went for performers and audience alike. Bianca was never Margarita, and La Castafiore demanded respect. And although Toscanini had long ago decreed that there were to be no encores at La Scala, when the audience demanded one from their nightingale, they got it.


End file.
